


Duet

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:53:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>post-"The Running Man."  <i>"You've kept in practice," Charlie said.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Duet

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Charlie, Don, and Numb3rs belong to Cheryl Heuton, Nicolas Falacci, and some people at CBS who aren't me.
> 
> This story was first posted February 4, 2006.

It wasn't like Don had any plausible deniability. He'd been able to hear the low murmur of his brother and father's voices from the garage, even if he couldn't make out words, so he'd known they would hear him playing. But if they'd come in while he was sitting there, playing the music his mother had written, then it would have turned into one of those awkward hugging moments: one of those moments when it would have been handy to have a woman in the family.

So Charlie and their dad stayed in the garage, and Don played the piece through, just once. He returned the sheet music to the dining room table and grabbed a beer, and went out to the garage to say hi like nothing had happened. Charlie promptly stole the bottle from Don's hand, and that was that, no hugging required.

Two days later, Don came by the house near dinner time to find it empty, and without thought he gravitated to the piano. It had been like that when he was in high school, after he'd given up piano to play baseball. The piano had been more fun when it was a secret, from his family and his friends; there had been an almost illicit thrill in playing to the empty house, knowing what his teammates would say if they knew. Piano was better than dance by the standards of teenaged boys, but not by a lot.

Don let his fingers hover over the keys, just learning their places again, before he sounded a chord from his mother's piece, sliding into a couple of measures he remembered. He played softly, letting the notes linger in the silence, and then let his hands fall to his lap. He didn't know where Charlie had put the music--probably in the bench, with all the rest. It wasn't on the dining room table anymore.

It wasn't until he moved to stand that he heard anything; when he looked up, Charlie was standing in the doorway, his bag over his shoulder and his jacket still on. Charlie took a step back and said, "Sorry--" just as Don said, "I didn't think any--" and they both fell silent, smiling sheepishly at each other.

"I could..." Charlie said, waving toward the garage, but Don shook his head. He wasn't seventeen anymore, and he didn't need to make this some elaborate pretense. There had already been enough of that.

On the other hand, he wasn't sure he was ready to play their mother's music with Charlie standing over there watching him, either. Don settled back on the bench, resting his hands on the keys, and played a quick scale, a fidget of sound. "You've kept in practice," Charlie said, still from the doorway, coming no closer, going no further away.

Don nodded and smiled. "Well, you know. Chicks dig it."

Kim had liked that he played, enough to buy a battered old second-hand player piano for one of his birthdays and get it all tuned up. They'd never taken the red bow off the top. She'd liked to lean down behind him while he played, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and watching his hands, kissing the spot behind his ear, trying to make him miss a beat and succeeding as often as not. He wondered what she'd done with it after they broke up; it was a more awkward keepsake than a returned ring.

Don glanced up at Charlie and played a little left-handed riff. "What about you?"

"Me?" Charlie looked surprised by the question, but Don honestly didn't know. He could guess, but he really had no idea, and Charlie had lived in this house, with their mother and this piano, for all the years Don had been away. "No," Charlie said, "No, I don't think I've touched it since I was nine."

Don nodded, watching his hands. He started playing Row, Row, Row Your Boat, right hand one measure ahead of the left. He cycled through the round twice before Charlie said, "I hated that you were better at it than I was."

Don stopped short and looked up. "You--Charlie, I started playing before you were _born_." Not by much: he remembered his mother sitting beside him on the bench, her round belly between her and the keys, listening to him do his practice every day. She'd always smiled, always told him how much she loved to listen to him, let him feel the baby kick and told him that meant the baby liked listening, too. When he was older he thought she'd been humoring him, to encourage him to practice: no one could have been that excited to listen to a five year old play scales for half an hour. Now he thought... maybe it hadn't been the music she was excited about. Maybe she'd been happy just to see him play.

Charlie just shrugged. "You started learning your numbers before I was born, too."

Don's jaw dropped. "You couldn't let me be better at _one thing_?" But Charlie was already ducking his head, looking ashamed, as Don said it. Hell, he'd only been nine. Don had been kind of a brat where his brother was concerned when he was nine, too.

"Sorry," Don muttered. "Never mind."

Charlie nodded, not looking up. "The thing is," he said, and stopped. Don flexed his fingers on the keys, drawing out a tiny shiver of sound, and watched Charlie, waiting. "Mom left the music in a box of my school things," Charlie said. "She left it for me to find."

Don nodded. He'd figured that out, too, and wondered why she hadn't left it for him--but then there hadn't been much of his stuff left in the house by the time she died, just one box squirreled away somewhere even he hadn't been able to find it when he picked up the rest of his stuff. She'd wanted Charlie to know. She'd wanted them all to know.

"I thought--I mean, I know she was busy," Charlie said, shrugging his bag off his shoulder and fumbling the clasps open. "But I thought maybe in all those years, that wasn't it, maybe she hedged her bets and put some things in some of my other boxes, so I went and looked, yesterday, and I found this."

Charlie took a couple of hesitant steps toward Don, holding out a sheaf of paper with his arm crooked. Not sure whether it would be welcome. Don reached out to take it from him, carefully, knowing this must be more of his mother's work.

It was a duet. Handwritten, dated 1981, and the second line was very simple: easy enough for six-year-old Charlie to have played, and for that matter Don could have managed the first line at age eleven. Could probably even manage it now. Don flipped through, and realized the following pages contained variations on the same duet, more and more complex, one line always markedly easier than the other. 1983, 1985, and then a gap, where he and Charlie had both quit playing. The next one was dated 1994, when he'd been at Quantico and Charlie had been back at CalSci. They hadn't been speaking then much more than they'd been playing piano. There were two more variations dated during the years Don had been away, working hundreds or thousands of miles from where his mother and father and brother lived.

The last variation was dated 2003. Don had been home by then. His mother had been in treatment, his father still working, and Charlie hadn't yet disappeared into the garage, but he and Don hadn't been speaking much more than they had before or after.

Don traced his fingers carefully over the notes of that last variation. She'd asked him, in the fall of that year, if he still played. It had been late one night, when Charlie and his dad were both at work and Don was looking after his mother. The chemo had made her sick for days at a time after each treatment, her face pale under the bright scarf she kept over her hair. He had said yes, and she'd asked him to play for her, so he had helped her over to the piano bench and she had sat beside him again, just as she did when he was a little boy, her hands folded in her lap, smiling as he stumbled rustily through scales and exercises, working his way up to the fragments and pieces he remembered. He'd played until she was leaning against his side, her head heavy on his shoulder, and then Don had carried her up to bed. She'd been lighter than Kim.

And sometime during all of that, while she was sick, while she was watching him and Charlie have no use for each other, she'd written this piece for them to play together.

"Mom never really asked me to do things," Charlie said, and Don looked up to see Charlie standing close enough to read the music he held in his hands. "If she wanted me to, y'know, put something away, take out the trash, whatever, she wouldn't tell me to, she'd just put it somewhere where I couldn't move without tripping over it."

Don nodded, watching Charlie's face. He remembered his mom doing things like that when he lived at home--more to Charlie than to him, because Don tended to _hear_ her when she told him to do something. Charlie looked down at the music. "Don, she put this in my path."

"Charlie," Don said carefully, "you don't have to..." It was too late now to do anything to please their mother--and Don had a feeling she'd have been as happy to know they worked together every day as to have them play this.

Well. Almost as happy. Maybe there was something to be said for doing things together that didn't center on violent crime.

"No," Charlie said, "No, I want to, I just. I haven't touched a piano in twenty-one years."

Don smiled, and set the music on the stand, turning back to the first page. "That's okay, Chuck, Mom took your skill level into account."

Don shifted all the way to the edge of the bench as Charlie sat down beside him. There was barely room for both of them; they were pressed together shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. Charlie's jacket rustled as he straightened his back and raised his hands over the keys--fingers arched and wrists up, as Mrs. Petrie had always demanded. "There's no tempo marked," Don said, setting his own hands to the keys. "Go slow, we'll sound it out."


End file.
